another oldie from the kps home page

I have been back in Victoria for over a year now and have had more than a few opportunities to talk KPS ideas to various Principals, teacher groups and individual teachers. I've also been interested to see the kinds of CCT-related work that is current in schools. What strikes me is how little has changed not just from when I was here last but since the 1980s when CCT use took off in schools. People still talk about integration. They still talk about problems of using this stuff in classrooms. They still talk about the needs of teachers. Almost all of the work is still "schooled". It is still pretend. And, I think that using CCTs to do pretend work is actually more difficult than using them for real work! In my humble opinion, all of this busy work with CCTs in classrooms misses the point. It is as if we are saying: all we need to do to prepare the young for the world beyond schools is to have them use CCTs for learning, teach them the current, vogue pieces of software and all will be well. This is the line that has been running since the 1980s and there is precious little evidence to suggest that learning has been improved/helped; that students are better prepared for the world outside. What is clear however is that students leave school wuth an abysmally limited sense of the changes that are playing out and which are totally dependent upon the delpoyment of CCTs.

old stuff

I was attempting (albeit unsuccessfully) to do some blog-like stuff on the kps home page. I thought I'd pop them into here even though they date back a little in time.

I've dated them back using the dating facility of Blogger.

I was doing some tidying and came across some words of Colin's and Michele's from last year. As they argue, it is always easy to lose sight of what is at the heart of formal educational practice.

As a crude paraphrasing it has been said that history is written by the winners. So, for the most part, are curriculum and pedagogy so far as they pertain to the formal educational work of schools. They are designed and written from the standpoint of what counts as succeeding within dominant Discourses as we all know. But while we all know this, it is easy to forget it in the hurly burly of classroom life. Although we have it paraded before us almost constantly, it is also easy to forget that most of the world's population live outside the representations of what it is to know and do and be (in effective and successful ways) that are peddled by curriculum designers and pedagogical experts. This is true whether success and effectiveness are seen in terms of individual benefit and advancement/development, or from the standpoint of benefits to private and public corporations moved by performativity and profit, or, as in the case of social and economic elites, from the standpoint of both.